What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?
The pandemic certainly kept the team busy, and it has sparked several ancillary matters relating to the future of work. My team supports employment law matters across EMEA, APAC and Latam. In many ways, the pandemic has highlighted opportunities for more people to work in or collaborate more strongly across different regions. Move around the globe and work in different ways is exciting, but not without concerns from an employment law perspective! Otherwise, the team continues to support the full amount of employment law issues, whether it be supporting M&A deals, providing training, managing litigation or simply ensuring compliance with ever-changing local labour laws across over 40 jurisdictions. Most significantly, the crises in Myanmar, Afghanistan and Ukraine have demanded remarkably swift and nuanced support from our workers.
If you have worked in other countries, what are the main challenges to operating as an in-house counsel in your current location?
APAC is an incredibly diverse, disparate and complex region, and it certainly energises me daily. It allows one to be exposed to vastly different legal, political and cultural landscapes. Now that I support multiple regions, providing thoughtful, consistent, flexible, and locally sensitive advice is a constant challenge.
How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?
I find a connection with the business partners, which helps me engage more directly with them. If you have that connection, it fuels a natural curiosity and excitement about what the business is trying to achieve. I think that helps build rapport and demonstrates investment in the business. At the moment, I am immersing myself in all things metaverse, so perhaps I am a little lucky that engagement with the company can genuinely equate to fun! Ultimately, I believe that connection and engagement better enable an adviser to be practical and commercial, which in turn helps build trust with the business.
The unusual business environment created by the pandemic has been swiftly followed by other shocks. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen and, if so, what does this entail?
The pandemic helped our team prioritise and see the value of ruthless prioritisation. We have taken many lessons from the pandemic and aimed to make them the norm rather than the exception, hopefully placing us in good stead for future shocks. Key among those lessons was the need to regularly recontract with internal partners to ensure that both sides understand capabilities, limitations, and respective priorities. This has helped ensure we remain on track and focused on what is important to the business and not simply engaged in doing what we have always done. The other element of the equally important pandemic has been the attention given to resilience. I am hopeful that maintaining a focus on mental health and ensuring the team is aware of available resources will better enable employees to cope no matter what comes.
